Mike Laub and specificity
The department has graciously allowed me to sit in on their theory lunches, held every Friday. This week Mike Laub from the Bauer Center talked about something called specificity.
Many systems-biologists are trying to map and understand signal pathways. Stimuli from the environment (inputs) cause chemical changes in the cell (outputs), but the path from inputs to outputs is fairly complicated. There might be several stages, or components, along this path. Mike has been studying two-component systems common in bacteria. In these systems the input activates one protein, a kinase, which in turn activates a second protein, called a response regulator, which generates the output.
The question is, what regulator does a particular kinase activate, and why does it only activate that one? This is a question of specificity. Mike said something about how, given enough time, any kinase would activate any of the regulators, so how do the signaling pathways remain distinctive? He and his lab took one of the kinases, mixed it one at a time with each of the possible regulators, and looked for activation.
The graphs he put up showing the response was really interesting. In the graph, which I've tried to reproduce here
, one of the regulators, say R0, responded rapidly to the kinase; a few more, R1 and R2, took a while to respond but eventually did; and the remainder didn't respond at all. Being in the midst of a breakup I’ve been thinking about relationships quite a bit, and it was difficult for me not to map these ideas and this particular graph onto the question of the ideal partner. In our human time scale, does it matter if the partner we are with is an R0 or an R1 or an R2; the partner with the rapid and strong connection, or the partner with the slower but eventually just as strong connection?
In the cellular time-frame, the rapid response is the one that matters. These reactions are happening often and in multiple sites in each cell and in out bodies. By the time the R1’s and R2’s react, it’s too late. This got me thinking, is there a meta-level at which optimal, or rapid response, human relationships are better than the others. In the world of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where the Earth is one big calculating machine, would it be better for us each to find this optimal partner?
Beautiful words/phrases
alpha helices
beta sheets
Many systems-biologists are trying to map and understand signal pathways. Stimuli from the environment (inputs) cause chemical changes in the cell (outputs), but the path from inputs to outputs is fairly complicated. There might be several stages, or components, along this path. Mike has been studying two-component systems common in bacteria. In these systems the input activates one protein, a kinase, which in turn activates a second protein, called a response regulator, which generates the output.
The question is, what regulator does a particular kinase activate, and why does it only activate that one? This is a question of specificity. Mike said something about how, given enough time, any kinase would activate any of the regulators, so how do the signaling pathways remain distinctive? He and his lab took one of the kinases, mixed it one at a time with each of the possible regulators, and looked for activation.
The graphs he put up showing the response was really interesting. In the graph, which I've tried to reproduce here
, one of the regulators, say R0, responded rapidly to the kinase; a few more, R1 and R2, took a while to respond but eventually did; and the remainder didn't respond at all. Being in the midst of a breakup I’ve been thinking about relationships quite a bit, and it was difficult for me not to map these ideas and this particular graph onto the question of the ideal partner. In our human time scale, does it matter if the partner we are with is an R0 or an R1 or an R2; the partner with the rapid and strong connection, or the partner with the slower but eventually just as strong connection?In the cellular time-frame, the rapid response is the one that matters. These reactions are happening often and in multiple sites in each cell and in out bodies. By the time the R1’s and R2’s react, it’s too late. This got me thinking, is there a meta-level at which optimal, or rapid response, human relationships are better than the others. In the world of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where the Earth is one big calculating machine, would it be better for us each to find this optimal partner?
Beautiful words/phrases
alpha helices
beta sheets
